Twitter apologizes for worldwide outage

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Twitter failed

Story highlights

Twitter was inaccessible for more than an hour

The social media site blames the outage on a technical glitch

Users were quick to joke about Twitter being down

Social networking site Twitter apologized for a worldwide outage Thursday that left the site inaccessible for more than an hour. It blamed the outage on a technical fault and said that despite speculation, it wasn't related to the London Olympics, which open Friday.

"We are sorry," Twitter's vice president of engineering, Mazan Rawashdeh, wrote in a blog post Thursday night. "Many of you came to Twitter earlier today expecting, well, Twitter. Instead, between around 8:20 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. PT, users around the world got zilch from us. By about 10:25 a.m. PT, people who came to Twitter finally got what they expected: Twitter."

He blamed the outage on the concurrent failure of two data centers. When one fails, a parallel system is designed to take over -- but in this case, the second system also failed, he said.

Some Twitter users speculated heavy traffic from the upcoming Olympics was to blame, but Rawashdeh said the cause was simply an "infrastructural double-whammy."